Before a Transition Pasadena steering meeting this past Fall, I came outside looking for one of my cats just in time to see him playing with something he seemed very interested in. Unfortunately, it was a hummingbird.

Humane Pest Control or Compassionate Conversation?

I was at a client’s home recently in Sherman Oaks, California. They told me about the gopher who had been eating the roots of their plants and creating little sink holes all over their yard. During our site visit, I noted the telltale signs of a landscape out of balance. I knew it would be my job to teach them how to fix their gopher problem by re-balancing their landscape. While we talked, the gopher responsible came out of a hole at the base of an umbrella plant. He looked directly at us while proceeding to remove three umbrella plant stalks and carry them backwards into his hole. I pointed this out to my client, and we laughed at his audacity.

Being that I’m a student of inter-species communication and believe that animals are sentient, I spoke to the wide-eyed little performance artist. I said, “I know you need to survive here just as much as the people who live in that house there, and so don’t worry, I’m going to include you in a solution that works for everyone here.”

Special Performers For Our List of Perennial Plants

People often tell me that they love the way I speak about plants and the landscape on my website. I definitely do express a unique perspective on non-human species and other organic elements of this beautiful, magical planet. In this post, I will list perennial plants that provide multiple ecosystem services* to us and focus on the mystical side of the plant world, which I have worked with in my professional ecological landscape design business for the last 15 years.

I fell in love with Nature** as a child. I lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and back then it was okay to wander for literally hours through the shipyards by myself. Generation X understands this. It was on those long, unsupervised walks that I discovered near-blinding pockets of magic. I would remember them for life. One was a tall stand of Anise (Pimpinella anisum) which had been colonized by a group of Ladybugs. The sun was shining on their brilliant red shells, popping them against the vibrant green stems. I stood surrounded by the wonderful scent of the plant and pinched several small lace clumps to savor the flavor, being careful not to scoop up any Ladybugs on accident.

Chinese New Year decorated the hearts and minds of hundreds of revelers last evening in Portland at the annual Threshold celebration in honor of China’s lunisolar new year, January 23, 2012. This is considered an auspicious year, that of the water dragon. In the excellent animated film ‘Spirited Away,’ spiritual beings come to an otherworldly spa to cleanse their energy bodies of the gunk of the world. A white dragon spirit soars in loops after his visit, and the main character wades calf-deep out into a silvery lake to watch.